It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)

Wednesday, May 04, 2016

POLITICAL ASTROLOGY

THE YEAR OF THE YANG FIRE MONKEY

I
have written about Political
Astrology before and in particular about the impact of unexpected change
created in the Year of the Monkey.

With
the topsy turvy politics that began a year ago with the totally unexpected win
by the NDP in Alberta and later the Trudeau Liberals federally in Canada and
the Trump and Sanders campaigns in the US change of the trickster kind, the
unexpected is the norm, it flows right into the year of the Monkey. As I said
back in 2004;

And why should we put such credence into the Year of the
Monkey? Well it occurs on a twelve-year cycle, and in Canadian politics the
year of the Monkey has seen the fall of many PMs and their parties.In the monkey year1992, Brian Mulroney stepped down as PM
and was replaced by Kim Campbell, who went down to defeat in the 1993 election.In 1980 Pierre Elliot Trudeau came out of retirement to
defeat PC Prime Minister Joe Clark, who had held his office for only a year. Of
course PET had the year of the Monkey on his side having become PM in 1968, a
crucial and revolutionary year of the Monkey.1968 is a quintessential year of the Monkey, with the Paris
uprising of students and workers, the Tet offensive effectively defeating the
Americans in Vietnam, the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention which led
to the election of two time loser Richard Nixon. The assassination of Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the Russian invasion of Chezslovakia.The Year of the monkey in 1956 saw John Diefendbaker elected
Leader of the Progressive Conservatives who win the 1957 election with a
Minority Government, the first minority government in Canadian history, which
lasted only one year.

The
Unexpected Should Be Expected should be the motto of this year of the
Monkey as it is the norm.

Today
we are seeing a much broader range of change occurring as this is the year of
the Male Fire Monkey a much more active trickster. With a Jupiter nature, the
Monkey Trickster spirit is sure to impact on mundane politics which Jupiter
rules. The rise of both Trump and Sanders are reflective of this spirit. And so
is the win by Leicester
in the Premier League of Football, their first such win in 132 years, at 5000-1 Odds !!!

Hoary
astrology is the practice of Political Astrology; it uses a base style of chart
first developed in England by the father of modern political astrology William
Lily who predicted the Great
London Fire of 1666. I do not have those abilities nor do I use the
standard astrological tools. I use an intuitive method looking at events that
would fit in the spirit of this year of the Monkey.

Hanuman
which is the Monkey God in Asia is the spiritual nature of Man the Trickster,
which we find in other cultures with their tricksters; Set of the Egyptians,
Loki of the Norse, Coyote and Raven of North American first peoples, the Fox in
Aesop’s Tales and in Japan, and Mercury for the Greeks. All of them turn the world on its head, spin
the magician or shaman around the leave folks guessing. They do it with a
laugh, either on you or on them. While the tricks can teach a lesson that
lesson may not be benevolent nor without some pain or other form of unexpected
event.

In
this the campaigns of Trump and Sanders actually reflect that Fire Yang of this
year’s Monkey Tai Sui the Grand Duke of Jupiter. Jupiter rules politics, the Twentieth
card in the Tarot; XX
The World or Aeon

.

Both
candidates for POTUS came from behind, with nothing but negative expectations
and media prognostications the magick of the media appointing or anointing their
winner and their loser, as though they were Thoth himself.

But
here the truth of Ptah did not come from the lips of the media but rather from
the people, change was in the air, as the saying goes. In the spirit of the
Monkey King, the people decided to support these two politicians because they
were not the usual kind of politician. One was a seventies anti war activist a
self avowed Socialist, the other a racist bigoted businessman who was both a
Democrat and a Republican. Such Janus
like archetypes now fill the imagination of the mass of the American public.

The
seventies, which is when I became a young radical activist, have returned, to
remind the yuppies, nerds and geeks that they are the baby boomers who lived in
the seventies, making it a time of both mass anti war protest and organizing
for a political revolution, a music and cultural upheaval and finally a spirit
of change, that society as well as the individual could change, it was Yippie
culture and Hippie culture combined, it was protest and self help/inward
awareness, paganism and Buddhism began to expand in North America. All of the
counter culture, freak culture of the Woodstock generation is wrapped in an old
guy who was a hero of mine when I was a teenager and he was an anti war
socialist elected mayor in Vermont.

This
particular historical moment in time, on the way to the second decade of the 21st.
Century with its millennial generation is exactly where we were at fifty years
ago, ironically. All the Occult and Revolutionary revival of the seventies is
coming to be the norm in this new age. The concept of an alternative consciousness,
a worldwide ascendant consciousness of humanity and the idea of a revolutionary
consciousness baptized the new century in Seattle and Chiapas in 1999. And five
years ago its zeitgeist became apparent to all of us with the Weltanschauungof the Arab spring.

Both
Trump and Sanders reflect this zeitgeist in the year of the Monkey, the anti
free trade movement has a left and right base and both these candidates reflect
these bases, while their parties the Democrats and GOP do not.

They
are the Left and Right of the same coin, a libertarian urge to social change
for the good of the individual and for society. Unfortunately as we have
learned from history this left right deviation occurred in the thirties and
created fascism, which has returned as the zeitgeist of the Trump movement. White
America is being swept up in final campaign, before it becomes a minority in
the United States.

Both Sanders and Trump reflect this, both are appealing to
predominately white voters, and in both cases they are appealing to the working
class, there is no middle class that was a socioeconomic myth of sixties sociologists to confuse producers with
consumers, creating new classes such as blue collar and white collar, to separate
them into economic categories. Everyone wants to be white collar, middle class, a
consumer, who may or may not be a direct producer, like auto workers, or
secretaries, both jobs created for post WWII North America.

Trump
appeals to the older white working class, while Sanders appeals to the new
generation their children and grandchildren who now live in a pre socialist
world of postmodern capitalism. Like Star Trek that my generation grew up with
the advanced communications, social media, internet world which is very much
the creation of the 21st Century, is real change occurring instantly
give or take a couple of months or years of development.

Apps
reflect this change, this shift from consumer based capitalism, to active ameliorating
capitalism on its way to becoming socialism, not just the conditions for
socialism but actually shifting productive relations into socialist relations
of production.

Everyone
under advanced capitalism is becoming a producer user, even this blog is
reflective of that change, by its very nature the blog allows me to create more
than just an article but an actual autonomous media form, that can be spread
everywhere on the internet, no different than the New York Times.

The
modern technology being used by millennial’s attests to this sense of coming
socialism, socialism of the association of free producers, artisans not wage
slave labourers, using apps they create
and share. We have a sharing economy bursting through a capitalist economy,
whether you and I like it or not. Revolutions are radical change whether people like
it or not and we are in a period of revolutionary change unseen since after WWI.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Uber
is one of these kinds of disruptive technologies it confronts the old taxi
culture that grew out of the forties to sixties when a small group of
capitalists dominated and created an industry based on ownership of state
sanctioned cab licenses.

The
ultimate purpose of Uber and other such apps, is to eventually be used by us to
call autonomous vehicles to our home, workplace or shopping mall, we will no
longer own cars, but use a new form of public transit, privatized as it is now.
It will change because we are now actually talking about socialism in North
America. Currently Uber is destroying the taxi industry, and transferring that ability to drive people, to people themselves, taking it out of its specialized role in society, in much the same way the car itself replace the horse drawn carriage or the street trolley.

But eventually once Big Auto starts producing autonomous vehicles, there will be an app used to call up a vehicle, but there will be no need for Uber.

Cars would be leased and once they outlived their lives they would be returned for recycling and reuse, this idea has been in circulation for twenty years now.

Socialism
is the natural result of the contradictions of capitalism, which is a failed
economic model, based on continuous growth of at least 3% annually, as Prof DavidHarvey has pointed out. Socialism occurs when capitalism reaches the point of
restricting the growth of technology, robotics, automation, which can free us
from the drudgery of wage slavery. We move from an economy based on production and waste, to one that is that is green, that uses natural resources in a way that
considers their finiteness, that then relies on reusing and recycling these products.

Green
economics is one aspect of socialism it involves current research in areas like
green manufacturing, green chemistry, etc. These are actual fields of research
and development. The idea is to take responsibility for your product from
cradle to grave and when we go to bury it we find ways of breaking it down and
reusing it.

Autonomous
production; the freedom to choose, that supposed gift of capitalism is actually
central to socialism, the concept of the free association of producers comes
with the change in technology, like 3D Printing. This allows for manufacturing
at home, a return of home based work, an end of the factory.

The Internet of Things, IoT allows us to administer things, not people, Engels ideal of the socialist state.

Millennial’s
understand this, they grok the potential in the social media they use, they live
in and live with. They used this to create the Arab Spring, the first world
wide revolutionary struggle since the Bolshevik and Spanish revolutionary struggles in the twentieth century . This consciousness
of change was not lost on them.

It
is this spirit of hope and change of that revolutionary potential that makes
them embrace Sanders call to political revolution and Socialism.

It
is the fear of job loss, of destruction of the norm, of the end of power of the
white race that drives their parents and grandparents to Trump.

Like
the turn of last Century which saw a horrifying war of Capitalist expansion
that cut short the lives of an entire generation in Europe, and the creation of
Modernism as a result, we are in a period of change, where consciousness, our
social and personal self awareness is aware that we and the times we live in
are full of potential for change and are changing.

Unlike
the lost generation of WWI our Millennial’s as well as members of Gen X, Y, Z
are all here. And like the generation of revolutionaries, modernists, they are
the voice of the future, of a socialism that is not 19th or even 20th
century, but a new model of an advanced technology shared for free in open
source.

Where work is what we all do because it is something we want to do, not
because we are selling our time to someone else. Technology is on the edge of
history, like Marx predicted in his work the Grundrisse, we can transform
capitalism into socialism, by using technology to free us from wage slavery.

The
followers of Trump are the heirs of the post WWI reactionaries and traditionalists who also appear at this time with the futurist and modernists
movements, they are the founders of Fascism.

They are not quite conservative or
aristocratic, though these values and images of power appeal to them, they are
actually as much a part of the revolutionary change in consciousness that is occurring,
their
spokespeople on the right talk about dialectics, gnosis, Hegelianism, all
the left topics that while they dispute them consider them important enough as
an ideology to continuously confront despite their protestations that Socialism
has failed, and is a failed ideology.

It
is more than an ideology; it is a historical zeitgeist originating in
capitalism once capitalism develops industry and technology to a level of
autonomous use it transforms into the potential for a socialist political
economy.

It
is here that the conspiratorial ideologues of the right, like Eugene Volokh, influence
the readers of both the National Review and the National Enquirer.

This movement of radical traditionalism of Evola and Volokh appeals to the American conspiracy theory imagination which Trump uses very effectively.

However the white working class, like the coalminers in Appalachia who have abandoned Clinton for Trump, do not see that their
jobs, their lives, their very existence being sacrificed by their bosses but
because of Free Trade deals.

With a reactionary consciousness they look to the very same boss who sold them out to
save them, the left and the Democratic party has failed them. But they too
embrace Sanders political revolution from the right, and support Trump because
he will end trade deals. He will save their jobs. Even if the Republican Party
is the party of free trade the very reason they have lost their jobs, they do
not care, they are not republicans they are Trumpites.

Sanders
and Trump’s political revolution also calls into question the whole two party system
and Trump more than even Sanders has exposed what a rigged game it is.

Sanders
political revolution harkens back to the seventies, to the ideals of the anti
war movement which was the first post WWII movement to seriously threaten the
establishment, even more so than the very successful CND anti nuke movement
that it originated from.

He
has not announced its structure, because as a transitional program it is made
up of demands like #Fightfor15, ending Big Money in politics, etc. are all
tactics for change, they are not a real program for socialist change. He is
using this campaign like a big anti-war teach-in.